


Comedians

by orange_crushed



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Funny old world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comedians

The world forms itself in unusual patterns.

"It looks like-" she stops and squints, the motion bringing a bloom to her icy cheeks. She breathes out of her nose. "A giant."

"A giant ?"

"A big fat giant crawling around on top of the hill." Rose giggles and rubs her arms for warmth, see-sawing from one foot to the other. She's making him laugh. "With a white, fluffy beard. It looks like he's staring at us and wiggling his bum."

"That is," he tells her, "the sacred mountain of the Guanga-dor. The holiest of holies." He arches one nearly-frostbitten eyebrow. "Care to recant ?"

"Hello, giant," she says, oblivious, wiggling her own bum in greeting. "Nice big rocks you've got there."

He stands next to her, behind her; there are trodden-down prints in the snow where her boots have been, and he covers the tracks with his own damp trainers. She scoots against him for shelter from the wind, all curves to his angles, and the air between them reaches (he thinks) about a million degrees. He glances up at the horizon from her point of view, and sees what she sees. It's pretty good. "M'freezing," she says.

"Back to the lodge ?" he asks. "Toasty fire, s'mores ? No, wait- I ruined a tie that way. Got to be something else." He pictures her in the firelight, imagines the clammy new warmth of her skin as she pulls off her socks and thermals. It's weirdly erotic, and makes his pulse jump. "Cider and pie ?"

"Cider and pie," she agrees.

 

 

"Aha-ha hahahahaha, ha," she says. "Ha."

"Rose, lower your voice." He glances around and the aliens in the seats adjoining theirs are staring. "This is the _opera_." In the plush seat beside his, Rose sinks lower, her hand balled up against her mouth and her eyes streaming with tears. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so inappropriate. "What's gotten into you ?" he hisses.

"Aho-hee ha ha hahoo hoo ha." She wipes her eyes, trembling. "A hoo-hoo-ha." Her voice cracks slightly and her chest shudders. "Do you see- do you, a ha ha hoo." She sucks in a gulp of air. "That one." Rose points to a chorus member in the back row, all tusks and taffeta, and he tries to follow her line of sight. "That one, there," she whispers, struggling for control. "It looks... it looks like- my- ha hahee hoo, hoowah."

"Your _what_ ?"

"M-m-my mum." She giggles at a high, hysterical pitch. "The dressing gown and curlers, Sunday breakfast."

He stops.

He stares.

"Rose," he starts, seriously, "I-"

He sees.

"Yes, Doctor ?"

"Aahoo ha ha ha hoowah ha ha," he says.

 

 

There is always some new thing; novelty doesn't wear off with the constant freshness of time travel. Space travel. Sightseeing. Whatever this is that they're doing.

It's raspberry ice-cream and Targonese pearls. It's the planet of silly hats. ("No, Rose, that isn't- that's his _head_ , Rose, not his- run.") It's the rubber planet in the foam system. Independence day on a planet colonized by sentient dolphins- the water shows alone are worth the price of admission. They sit in the half-empty stands and eat popcorn and clap politely as an archduke balances a ball on his slippery sea-mammal nose. They visit a Wild West saloon at Jupiter Disney and drink too much, at which point they discover it is actually Colorado in 1879 and the Doctor has been cheating at cards. ("Not... _much_ ," he says. "And, run.")

It's the changing landscapes of the body; Rose's shoulderblades and his stomach in the nightshade-colored hours before dawn, low lamps running flares at the edges of her skin, of his. Outlines and valleys, the smooth globes of her breasts and belly, the sharp stones of his knees. He buries his face in her throat, inhaling the smell of salt and deodorant that's wearing off, running his teeth along the apple of her earlobe. She laughs, her belly against his, wrapping her arms around his neck, kissing his ears and eyes and nose.

"I found your mole," she says, prodding it.

"I found-" he starts, too innocently, and slips a finger along the soft separation between her thighs. She sighs and arches up. "Your on-switch."

"Cheater."

"You like it."

She finds another way to answer that.

 

 

Unusual is one word for this universe.

There are others.

"This is so unfair," she says. Her hand hovers over an image of his chest, daring it not to solidify under her hand. Unbelievably, it doesn't. It's the first time he's seen the laws of nature rebel utterly against her, _her_ , the creature bound by them. It throws all his assumptions on their heads. "I can't bear this. Not touching you." Her voice is shaking, like his veins. "Oh, say something."

"Rose, you're-" he shuts his eyes, collects the darkness, opens them again. "You remember the Bellotron system ? You said it looked like a massive arm holding a snow-cone." She's staring at him, baffled; obviously her heart is breaking but she finds a smile for him.

"You're cracked." She grins, crookedly. "Yes, I remember."

"There's a star in the middle of it," he murmurs, and now his hands move against hers, palm to palm, sensations deadened by the hologram where their edges blur. It's like a mirror. A pattern on glass, fingerprints, steam. Reflection. "And that star's gravity pulls everything in- everything for a hundred million miles. A hundred billion miles. It tugs and tugs, and whole universes circle around it, always moving closer. It's the center of that entire world."

"Ah."

"Rose-" he stumbles over her name, as never before. His hearts are beating wildly and it pains him that she can't hear it. "Do you know what I'm trying to tell you ?"

"Is this me," she answers, reaching her hand up to his face, "tugging ?" He nods. "God, I-" she starts, and breaks, and lifts her head up. She doesn't stumble as she speaks; her words are clear as glass. "I love you."

"I'll come for you," he says.

"Can you promise that ?" she asks, sadly. "Can you really ? If you can't, don't. It's alright."

"I-" he begins, and vanishes.

 

 

Life is less funny.

He sneaks into a theatre in nineteen sixty-three and watches double-feature horror movies late into the night. They were hilarious once; Rose beside him doing all the voices, dribbling popcorn out of her mouth when he'd glance over. Now they're sad, black and white reels of longing and loss, hands disappearing under swamp fog, bodies tumbling from cliffs, long hallways of darkness; isolation, heartbreak, death. He pities the wolfman and the mummy. Tries not to pity himself.

There's a bloodless revolution on Betamuuuu, and when the new democratic congress raises its flag for the first time there are giant alien cows on it. Pink ones. Something to do with the founding colonies' freedom-fighting dairy farmers. He looks around wildly for a snickering face and finds not a single one. "Oh," he says, when they turn around to stare at him for choking in the middle of the elections. "I was thinking of something- else."

His chuckles take on a desperate tone.

"Yes, I _know_ ," he shouts. "He's- it's all very sad ! But you have to admit, he was an essentially rotten fellow." The TARDIS does not answer him in words, but with a mild fluctuation in the temperature. "I know that's not an excuse- but, but ! He drowned in caramel ! He was rolled through a vat of walnuts !" The Doctor stops circling the console to cast wild, unhinged scowls at the walls. He's quite alone, and feeling every atom of unfilled air. "His last name was _Sweets_ ," he adds, desperately. The TARDIS flashes the warning lights.

He loses a potential companion after an uncharacteristic attempt at bathroom humor. He stops watching television altogether. He breaks down and pulls some of his stuffier waistcoats out of storage, spends an afternoon trying to assemble them into a reasonable outfit, and throws them down the stairs in a fit. He does not say the word "lonely."

"I'm fine," he tells everyone he meets, when they ask. "I'm really, exceptionally fine. I'm doing very well for myself. I'm the picture, the paragon, the encyclopedia illustration of _fine_."

He lies.

 

 

One day, the monitor malfunctions.

It's a pop and a fizz that ought to be static but isn't; it's the blurry edge of a woman's face, a jawbone and a sweep of blonde hair that he knows nearly better than he knows himself. For a second this shapeless and familiar mass sets a camera on its side and peers into the unfocused lens. It cuts out abruptly, and he's left yelling hysterically into a computer monitor with his hands braced on either side. It takes a week to find the identical frequency but the picture never returns.

He begins to pay attention to signs and signals, traffic lights that stay on too long and scrawls on park benches; there's something that he's missing. It appears at last during the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, written on the side of the Norway Pavilion in chalk. He's just saved three women from a stolen Magros plant, alien and particularly venomous, and he's leaning on the side of the building with one hand, catching his breath. His hand comes away white and dry. The letters are child's letters.

B A D W O L F

"Oh," he says. "You."

It becomes an obsession, a series of steps. He dances to that old tune out of habit, maybe; maybe out of hope. He follows the letters to Norway, then to Norway the planet, where they once spent a comfortable night in the galaxy's best jail. It takes him to Nostradama, the planet of the seers, none of whom seem to be able to make change or draw a decent map. He sees the letters on the side of a barge headed for New New New Jupiter and beats it there, landing just in time to see a boy spray-paint the shape of a wolf on a bridge. "I must be mad," he says, to nobody. "Listening to pictures. Well, one can't listen to a picture," he adds, conversationally, to the graffiti he's crouched beside. "I'm sure you get the idea."

He is led back and forth so many times that his charts begin to make him dizzy. It's as if a power is weaving him around some invisible loom, on some pattern he can't decipher. "This was," he tells the words, scrawled on a barstool in the Hesperides cluster, "her sign. To herself." He considers that while he finishes his drink. "I don't know where that leaves me," he confesses, into the bottom of the mug. The light shimmers off the edge and he turns it over- cast and stamped at Bad Wolf Glassworks, Lower Hesperides. He explains this to the bartender in great detail as he asks for directions.

"This," the man tells him, "is going to be a very funny story someday."

"I hope so," the Doctor says.

At the Glassworks the foreman is unfriendly to his inquiries, unfriendly even to the psychic paper, which in his slightly desperate state unfortunately made him an Inspector from the Let Me The Hell In Division. ("Bad, _bad_ paper.") It turns out that there's been a series of mysterious deaths, which in the end are not deaths at all but non-fatal absorptions by the very large Glassine Beast of Caxullula.

"I was lonely," squeaks the beast. It lets the workers go and slides back into the planet's core to melt and turn and bubble. The Doctor's relief is tempered by his disappointment at finding the factory totally devoid of signs or clues.

"Thanks for your help," he says, shaking the foreman's hand. "If it comes back, just... give it a job or something." There is a noise behind them like glass breaking, which is not unusual; and the sound of a zepplin crashing directly into the roof, which is. They run at a breakneck speed up the fire stairs, the Doctor reaching the roof first; where the smoking hulk of a zepplin is revealed to actually be one-third of a zepplin exactly, crumpling and cut off sharply at the back edges with what looks like a force-field retaining laser. Or a misfired portal. There is somebody struggling out of the emergency exit hatch. "Are you alright ?" he calls. "I'm coming to help you !"

"I'm fine," she says; and it is Rose.

She wiggles out of the hatch and drops to the ground beside him. There's a large, blinking bit of technology strapped to her waist; the wires are frayed and sparking. She's grinning like a loon at him. "So _that's_ what this button does."

He laughs until he's crying.

 

 

"I never expected to see you again," she muses, "but I knew that I would." She itches the back of her calf with her own toenail. "Does that make any sense ? I suppose it does." They are lying together in the garden, which the TARDIS has helpfully outfitted with balloons in the shape of dogs and giraffes. When she saw them she didn't stop giggling for ten minutes; it was a symphony, a _banquet_ of laughter for a starving man. He'd have tried out new knock-knock jokes on her already, but he didn't want to rush things. "Maybe I didn't want to jinx it," she admits.

"Well, you know," he says, softly, into the scrub of her scalp and the tangling stream of her hair, "your people have a saying for that. Men plan-"

"-God laughs," Rose finishes for him. She rolls onto her back to look up at him, and grins winningly. He presses a kiss to her temple. The creases at the edges of her smile will be distinguished someday, he thinks. "And here we are." Her eyes are like ribbons, unfurling for him. They're bright with laughter. Sunlight. Starlight. Tesla's currents. "I think God has a pretty good sense of humor."

"Or a weird one."

"Or a weird one," she agrees.

"I don't believe in your god," he reminds her. He wonders if she'll flinch, blink. Human preconceptions are so difficult to overcome. She doesn't- instead she curls against him, her hand over his left heart, her knees tucked into his like stacking puzzle pieces. She fits.

Funny old world.

"Believe in this," she says.


End file.
